The Old Painter at the Violin

by Michael Blumenthal

Because it is his destiny
to love what is beautiful
and, what's more to add to it,
he sits on his high stool,
before what he has already made,
in his jeans and blue sneaker
and his torn, grey socks,
and plays Vivaldi to his own Matisse,
Boccherini to his love for Cezanne.

On the easel before him,
in a white, luminous vase,
are the peonies and the poppies,
the dahlias and the bachelor buttons,
he has made from his mind's eye
the night before, and around him
his Bottom & Titania, and his dead wife,
who remains in this life and in the room
by his memory and by the rendering
that gives life to his memory

"I went my own way," he says,
and so he goes, still. And so he goes,
as well, to his violin, not
to improve anymore, he admits,
but so as not to go backwards,
because, even at seventy-eight, he says,
to go backwards is the greatest sin of all.

And so he plays on. Not perfectly,
but because just the same;
no better than yesterday, but
at least mo worse. So that Vivaldi
and Cezanne would have been proud.
And as his arms glide over the strings,
he is a happy man: Happy
because he holds to his own vows,
happy because he never goes backwards,
happy because the peonies and the violin,
in his hands are one. Happy
because, in the cacophony of this life,
the one voice he always heard clearly was his own.